TWiki is an enterprise collaboration platform and application platform. TWiki has been downloaded over half a million times and is used as a mission critical platform by many leading Fortune 500 businesses and government agencies on their intranet, extranet or public website. Users without programming skills can create web applications. Developers can integrate TWiki applications with other enterprise applications.

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TWiki-6.0.0 released on 2013-10-14 is a major release that has a shiny new dashboard look. It brings many usability enhancements, strengthens TWiki as an application platform, and scales to very large deployments with thousands of webs and a million pages.

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TWiki-6.0.0 released on 2013-10-05 is a major release that has a shiny new dashboard look. It brings many usability enhancements, strengthens TWiki as an application platform, and scales to very large deployments with thousands of webs and a million pages.

Introduction

TWiki is an enterprise collaboration platform and application platform. TWiki has been downloaded over half a million times and is used as a mission critical platform by many leading Fortune 500 businesses and government agencies on their intranet, extranet or public website. Users without programming skills can create web applications. Developers can integrate TWiki applications with other enterprise applications.

TWiki-6.0.0 released on 2013-10-14 is a major release that has a shiny new dashboard look. It brings many usability enhancements, strengthens TWiki as an application platform, and scales to very large deployments with thousands of webs and a million pages.

Notes for TWiki Administrators and Wiki Champions

New Dashboard Feature

A dashboard comes into play when users need to get an overview of their work and want to navigate quickly to relevant places. The TWikiDashboardAddOn application is designed to give administrators a tool to quickly create dashboards for the intranet home, knowledge base, team homepages, project homepages, and more. The TWiki web homes are now dashboards, and we invite you to use this to prettify your own team homepages and TWiki applications.

Dashboards can optionally have a banner image. TWikiDashboardImages has a collection of over 100 images to chose from.

The tiles have a gray shadow look and have rounded corners. The style is based on the ScrollBoxAddOn. That application also supports scrollable text and image rotation.

New WatchlistPlugin

The WatchlistPlugin is a new addition to TWiki. It adds watchlist feature to TWiki topics. Topics of interest can be watched and unwatched. A user can see recent changes of all watched topics. A user can also subscribe to get e-mail notification of changes, either immediately on each topic save, or in digest mode once a day. The top-menu has a new "Watch" pulldown to watch and unwatch the current topic.

Scalability Enhancements

TWiki has been enhanced to support and manage large site with thousands of users, hundreds of webs, and a million pages:

You can enable the MetadataRepository to enumerate webs. If you have thousands of webs, it takes a while to traverse the data directory to find out all webs, which happens e.g. when showing the selection of move destination. MetadataRepository can house additional information for your custom user mapping manager to consume.

You can make webs autonomous, which means that each web has its owners, who get full access to the web regardless of access restriction setting. If you have thousands of webs, you may be fed up with web owners asking for help when they lock themselves out by mistake.

You can use multiple disks. If you have thousands of webs, all webs may not fit one single disk.

Spec Change for Empty DENYTOPICVIEW

From TWiki 4.0 and prior to 6.0, the syntax * Set DENYTOPICVIEW = (nothing) in a topic means deny nobody the topic view. The reason for this behavior is that it allows public access to a topic in a restricted web, e.g. having * Set ALLOWWEBVIEW = Main.VipGroup in WebPreferences. This is not symmetric with the fact that an empty DENYWEBVIEW is the same as an undefined DENYWEBVIEW, hence confusing.

From TWiki 6.0 on, an empty DENYTOPICVIEW means the same as not defined. To open up a topic in a restricted web, you need to use * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = Main.AllUsersGroup. The Main.AllUsersGroup is new. It is a pseudo group containing all authenticated and unauthenticated users. You can use Main.AllAuthUsersGroup if you want to specify all authenticated users.

To keep publicly accessible topics in restricted webs publicly accessible, the tools/eliminate_emptydenytopic script is provided, which replaces * Set DENYTOPIC<action> = with * Set ALLOWTOPIC<action> = Main.AllUsersGroup in all topics in all webs.

Dynamic Access Control

Dynamic access control allows you to use TWiki variables in access control variables such as ALLOWWEBVIEW. You can restrict access based on topic name pattern or TWiki form field value, for example. This feature is considered experimental.

User Masquerading

With user masquerading, you can check if access restriction is working as expected for another user.

To use this feature, the following requirements need to be met.

initializeUserHandler() is provided by a plug-in and it sets a special user identity under masquerade.

TWiki Forms Enhancements

Several enhancements have been done to TWikiForms to make it easier to create TWiki applications and for better usability.

Adding/changing/removing a TWiki Form has been moved from the edit screen to the "More topic actions" screen. Users are no longer tempted to accidentally add or remove TWiki Forms.

The WEBFORMS preferences setting has been removed. TWiki Forms Template topics are now detected automatically.

New combobox TWiki Form field type. In some cases it is desirable to have a fixed picklist, and at the same time an edit field to override the picklist options.

Use the new EDITFORMFIELD variable to create HTML forms that update TWikiForms, such as a custom "create new topic" form, or a topic header that allows users to change some form values at the top of the page. A valid form is composed of a start form type, various form fields, a submit type, and an end form type.

New TOPICTITLE Feature

The %TOPICTITLE% variable will expand to a nice display name of a page. The existing %TOPIC% variable expands to the page name, and is typically restraint to a WikiWord or acronym.

The TOPICTITLE variable expands to the topic display name in this sequence until found:

Value of form field named "Title" (already in use by several TWiki applications such as the TWiki:Support forum on TWiki.org)

Preferences setting TITLE

Topic name %TOPIC%

The topic display name feature is implemented, but the TWiki topic handling does not yet support this in the GUI. The UI of a future TWiki release will be enhanced to make use of the topic display name:

Create new topic, edit topic: New field for topic display name

Rename topic: Show topic display name field

Statistics Enhancements

A number of enhancements have been made to the statistics script. To make use of these enhancements, you need to update TWiki installations with existing WebStatistics and SiteStatistics topics. The tools/convert_stats_twiki6 tool does that. No action needs to be taken for new TWiki installations.

On SiteStatistics, to show the lists of most viewed webs and most updated webs, you need to specify a number in $TWiki::cfg{Stats}{SiteTopViews} and $TWiki::cfg{Stats}{SiteTopUpdates}. The SiteStatistics used to use the WebStatistics parameters. These changes are described at TWikiSiteTools#MaxNoOfItemsInColumns

You may want to see which divisions/department of your company are using TWiki overall or on a web level. This can be done by providing a getAffiliation($cUID) method in the user mapping handler. Details at TWikiSiteTools#AffiliationBreakdown

You may want to exclude Trash and other webs from getting their WebStatistics updated. Setting a regular express of excluded webs to $TWiki::cfg{Stats}{ExcludedWebRegex} achieves that. Details at TWikiSiteTools#ExcludedWebRegex

WebStatistics and SiteStatistics grow indefinitely, which may not be an issue in most cases. They may grow really big in 5 years or 10 years time. Read TWikiSiteTools#WebStatisticsYYYY if you want to prevent that.

New MovedSkin

Use the MovedSkin when you migrate TWiki to a different site with a different URL. When enabled on the old site users will be redirected to the new page URL on the new site.

Usage of $TWiki::Plugins::VERSION

The $TWiki::Plugins::VERSION number can be used by plugins for conditional code execution. From TWiki-6.0.0 on, the version umber is aligned with the TWiki version number, e.g. for this release, $TWiki::Plugins::VERSION is set to 6.00. The number needs to be numeric so that a number comparison can be done. By convention, Major.MinorPatch is used, e.g. 6.12 for a future TWiki-6.1.2 release.